In today's society, there tends to be great debate over how the issues of privacy are dealt with in new technologies . In the case of VoIP, there has been a great deal of controversy regarding legal aspects of the technology and how that affects the privacy of individuals and corporations that depend on VoIP as their primary method of communication.
Under existing United States wiretapping laws, the FBI already has the ability to conduct surveillance of broadband users through its DCS 1000 system (previously called Carnivore), through a court order.
However, as a relatively new technology an industry standard has not yet been completely implemented, meaning that the lack of unification will make it harder for Federal institutions to enforce and regulate the use of VoIP.
Trope (2004, 10) asserts that the problem stems from the fact that such VoIP providers like Vonage, Time Warner Cable, Net2Phone, 8x8, and Deltathree do not adhere to the standard. This complicates federal surveillance, and thus the FBI has attempted to rectify this issue by implementing a broad blanket solution that will be able to monitor all VoIP communications.
A United States law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), requires telecommunications services to rewire their networks to provide police and the FBI with guaranteed access to wiretaps. In addition, the legislation allowed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate what categories of companies were subject to this law. Thus far, only traditional analog phone companies and mobile services have been subject to CALEA. However, given the power granted by the legislation to the FCC to regulate what categories of companies are subject to this law, it is foreseeable and likely that VoIP companies will soon be seen to be of a class that the FCC recognizes as falling under this law.
The combination of 1964 federal wiretap laws (and its numerous amendments), along with CALEA, have put the FBI in a position to have the authority to wiretap broadband services. Trope (2004, 10) thus states that if VoIP joins PSTN and mobile services to be subject to CALEA, it means that federal authorities are able, not only to monitor telephone calls made by VoIP, but any data transmissions that are made over the broadband service, giving access to privileged information, confidential or business trade secrets, and sensitive medical information.
Some companies, such as MetaSwitch and Cisco Systems, Inc. have made their technologies CALEA compliant, providing FBI backdoor access to any VoIP transmissions. However, technological limitations will still inevitably lead to over-inclusive sweeps of data transmissions. Specifically, if broadband providers cannot isolate specific VoIP calls between individual users, police are entitled to access the “full pipe�, meaning that the information belonging to thousands of other customers will be made available for police investigation.
In addition, Coffee (2004, 69) comments that he fears added friction in introducing new technologies: "Protocol improvements might be delayed by the need to update monitoring techniques". This kind of uncertainty is likely to stunt the growth of the burgeoning new technology.
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Siang Lu 16:23, 27 Oct 2004 (EST)
